Editor’s Note

Toward Making Changes in Mass Communication Research and Doctoral Education Happen

The Report of the Task Force on the Status and Future of Doctoral Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, released on Sept. 11, 2006, and available on the AEJMC Web site, should be required reading for all of us who care about the future of mass communication education and research.

A lot is there—fifty-nine pages—and all of that will take some digesting. But it also is what is not there, and pointing out that the Task Force Report in many ways asks more questions than it answers is no criticism, which will require the most thought.

The first substantive section, “The Changing Landscape of Doctoral Educa-tion in Journalism and Mass Communication,” goes on for six-and-a-half pages, almost entirely single-spaced, on general trends in higher education, trends in communication, and implications for doctoral students. The points are sharp, while not being worded so as to be offensive to any person or school of thought, or being clearly defeatist. The section’s author, Charles T. Salmon, points out that “university administrators are directing considerable effort and attention to promoting interdisciplinary scholarship”; “never before have our [JMC] faculty members had more opportunities for collaborative research”; and “our faculty of the future will need to provide the intellectual infrastructure for the many applications of communications technologies in other disciplines.” He makes the double-sided observation that “much of the groundbreaking work occurring in ‘communications’ education is happening at the margins of these emerging pockets of interdisciplinary activity rather than in the center of traditional communications programs,” and it is clear that he is more concerned with the lack of groundbreaking work in the latter than excited about the former. For Salmon says here that ours is a “field that is largely oriented to the comfortable and familiar theories of the past or to theories that have arisen in allied disciplines” (and that the poaching of other fields’ theories while not exporting our own is, as prolific author/researcher Charles Berger put it, “the ‘intellectual trade deficit’ that has for so long plagued our field”) and a “lack of theoretical innovation and leadership that unfortunately has come to characterize our discipline.”

A second substantive section of the report, “What Do Doctoral Education Programs Need to Do?,” written by Hazel Dicken-Garcia and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, includes ten recommendations, each with an explanation. The eighth is, not surprisingly given Salmon’s section, “Assure Interdis-ciplinary.”

Let’s briefly and bluntly consider the issue of interdisciplinary research involving mass communication. One problem is that many scholars in other disciplines still think of departments and schools of journalism and mass communication as little better than trade schools and are surprised to find out that JMC even has scholarly journals, let alone a lot of them, a significant body of social scientific theory, and an even larger body of data gathered by social scientific methods. One could complain that, for example, a sociologist writing about mass media would be amazingly oblivious not to stumble across Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and one would be correct as far as that goes, but one also must realize that our discipline, both department by department and discipline-wide, is still throwing off trade school vibes: as JMCQ Editor Dan Riffe and others have noted, the mean average number of journal articles written by JMC professors in the United States is less than one. (The mean average number of books written or edited by U.S. JMC professors also is less than one.) Even in 2007, the number of JMC professors who do not hold a doctorate is substantial, and lest one attribute that only to rising academic standards over a period of decades, the number of JMC professors still hired each year without a doctorate is significant. As I have written about before in other venues, the number of JMC professors working as paid consultants, paid media critics, paid expert witnesses, paid government advisors, and so on—let alone thrusting themselves into important debates as “public intellectuals”—is also minimal. In short, it is difficult for scholars in other disciplines to pay attention to JMC scholars if we are difficult to notice.

Many JMC units also have put a high emphasis on becoming schools or colleges of their own, which has many benefits but also can further remove them from other disciplines and departments at a university. What about doctoral education? When I was a doctoral student in the late 1990s at the University of Georgia, doctoral students were required to take at least four quarters of work outside the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication. I took one course in history, two in sociology, and one jointly listed by anthropology and education. That requirement was not unusual then or now. Did that prepare me for, or inspire me to do, interdisciplinary research? Perhaps, at best. I discovered in Linda Grant’s course that qualitative methodologies in sociology were about the same as in mass communication (probably because both disciplines had borrowed heavily from anthropology). I gathered from Gary Alan Fine’s course that sociologists were eager to distance their cultural studies from our (mass communication) cultural studies, even while some of them (not including Fine) casually wrote about mass media regardless of whether they really knew what they were talking about. The history course was helpful as the first time I had ever studied what one might call the philosophy of history, but it did not and could not have led to any interdisciplinary scholarship more than media historians already do, and the education/anthropology course turned out to be interesting, but irrelevant then and since. Perhaps I just picked, albeit carefully, the wrong courses (many fellow doctoral students stocked up on psychology courses), but perhaps the cafeteria approach to the outside “cognate” is just too little, not always encouraging or inspiring, and even—to some extent—the opposite.

Overall, then, I tend to think that more interdisciplinary work among faculty and graduate students in journalism and mass communication and those in other disciplines is not going to happen at the initiative of most of those in other disciplines, nor through the requirements of Ph.D. programs. Some JMC schools/departments have hired faculty members with one or more degrees in fields outside JMC, in addition to those who have a law degree and teach media law/regulation and those who have a graduate business degree and teach media management, advertising, public relations, or business journalism. But stocking JMC programs with Ph.D.s in political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and so on has its real and potential downsides (skills courses, anyone?). It also hardly furthers the idea of working with mass communication scholars and scholarship rather than simply taking over mass communication (which many scholars in other disciplines already have started doing in large numbers by publishing articles and books about journalism, public relations, and/or advertising while having no relevant academic training and no relevant professional experience). We also know that the idea of expecting JMC professors to hold one or more graduate degrees in mass communication and one or more graduate degrees in another discipline conducive to their own interdisciplinary scholarship is, for many reasons, a nonstarter (although certainly there are some JMC professors who already fit that profile). And, it appears to me, although many JMC professors belong to at least one scholarly organization outside of mainstream communication concerns (a survey of Mass Communication & Society Division members a few years ago certainly showed this), JMC professors are having relatively little impact on those organizations’ conferences and even less impact on their journals. (Try to find a professor who teaches in a journalism department/school and has degrees solely or only in JMC who is on the editorial board of a journal that is in another discipline and publishes some articles about or closely related to mass media. Full disclosure: I review manuscripts for three sociology journals—one on sociology of religion and two essentially on sociology of gender—but am on the board of only one new, online one.)

No, it seems to me that if one is serious about substantial intellectual cross-pollination, with mass communication as a discipline maintaining—as the University of California–Davis’s Charles Berger would have it—a trade balance if not a trade surplus in ideas and theory, that JMC professors will have to act concretely (and not just talk): take the initiative with interdisciplinary journals, and a lot more interdisciplinary conferences, courses, books, and studies. Barbie Zelizer’s book Taking Journalism Seriously, which I reviewed two issues ago in this journal, is—for example—one such concrete step. The mere act of assessing how much mass communication has contributed to and benefited from other disciplines’ work would seem to be an essential, if not also first, step. But we have a long way to go. Zelizer’s book was not only the most important in years in our discipline for encouraging future, not publishing completed, interdisciplinary research, it was also in most ways unique. On top of that, it has been, unfortunately, reviewed hardly anywhere else. None of this is encouraging.

The Dicken-Garcia et al. section’s tenth recommendation is “Teach public scholarship.” Because I have written and spoken in many other venues about the opportunities for JMC professors to be “public intellectuals”—or, if you prefer, “public scholars” or merely “engaged scholars”—I will not belabor that topic here.

A third substantive section, chaired by Dan Shaver and Mary Alice Shaver, with assistance from many others, is titled, “Status of AEJMC-Affiliated Doctoral Programs, July 2005.” The statistic that jumped out at me—other than good news that minority enrollment in Ph.D. programs was, region by region, as high as 25.6% (Northeast), is that international student enrollment, region by region, ranges from a low of 27.6% in the South to a high of 41.8% in the Midwest. This says a great deal about the attractiveness of our Ph.D. programs to scholars from around the world, and may foretell impressive amounts of important international and intercultural scholarship in the future. But the remaining low absolute number of native-born Americans who are interested in pursuing a doctorate in our field perhaps tells us something about anti-intellectualism among our massive numbers of undergraduate and master’s students (in addition to the professional motivations and market incentives that we’ve long formally known about).

The fifth substantive section, chaired by Gerald Kosicki, is titled, “The Role of AEJMC in Promoting JMC Doctoral Education,” and frankly says, “Graduate programs are often the last thing on the minds of some of our most talented undergraduate students.” (In fact, anecdotal evidence tells me that while the quality of JMC doctoral students remains relatively high—if only because of how selective they are and the self-selectiveness of those deciding to apply for Ph.D. programs. But some of our less talented undergraduate students and recent alumni, because they otherwise are unemployed if not nearly unemployable in mass communication professions, definitely and increasingly are looking to our M.A. and M.S. programs, to which they often can barely be admitted and in which they probably will perform no better than they did as undergraduates. And this apparently is not true only at less prestigious and/or less selective master’s degree programs; for example, Samuel G. Freedman’s 2006 book, Letters to a Young Journalist, struck me as less than complimentary about at least a notable portion of even Columbia University’s graduate students.)

Kosicki’s section includes many promising ideas for recruiting more and better doctoral (and master’s) students, if only in the United States. For instance, they include repeating another key point from Salmon’s section—the Boyer Commission for Educating Undergraduates in the Research University’s recommendation that scholarly research be integrated into the undergraduate curriculum. But Kosicki’s section does not mention what I think is the most significant “disconnect” in our discipline between Ph.D.-trained faculty, doctoral students, and the typical undergraduate: the overwhelming majority of textbooks used in U.S. undergraduate JMC courses include little to no discussion of social scientific or critical theory, or the results of any scholarly studies, even when those theories and/or studies are directly relevant to the textbook’s content. (It would seem to be to everyone’s benefit if the reviewing process for JMC textbook proposals and manuscripts included some mechanism for ensuring that relevant scholarly literature is cited, something that seems routine in the sciences and perhaps even in other social sciences.) In addition to beefing up the textbooks, perhaps undergraduates would be more interested in earning Ph.D.s and/or becoming JMC faculty themselves if more of them had some idea of what it is that a mass communication Ph.D. is trained to do and has done.

Dane S. Claussen, Editor
dsclaussen@hotmail.com